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Thursday, October 27, 2016

Earlier this week I was a co-presenter for a 2 day workshop on SBTM (Session Based Test Management) at Unity.

While I have a solid amount of relevant experience (speaking at conferences, organising and speaking at meet-ups, being a co-instructor for BBST Foundations course multiple times, mentoring and coaching testers in previous projects and mentoring and coaching speakers at Toastmasters), actually facilitating a 2 day workshop for over 40 attendees is another kettle of fish! All of the experience I mentioned helped me prepare for this workshop but it was almost definitely the hardest thing I've done in my career so far.

I was paired with someone who had some experience giving workshops - so that gave me some piece of mind. Having a co-presenter with you up there to help you share experiences and ask the participants questions was very helpful. I also really liked the fact we were able to share two different perspectives - sometimes contrasting. There were times where I was very nervous and scared, and turning to my partner in crime, Johanna Forsberg really helped. (I can't imagine how lonely it would've been giving a workshop to 40 people by yourself)

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Olof Svedström has worked as an engineering lead within software testing and quality at Spotify for 5 years, during a period when he has been part of the journey where they have grown from 5 to 100 million active users and from 150 to 2000+ employees. Before Spotify he spent some years as a tester in a spectrum of companies, ranging from small product ones to international giants.

What does your role as QA Team Lead at Spotify involve?

Being a chapter lead (team lead) at Spotify is a people manager position and not e.g. a test lead position. I do very little to none test leading as the development is done in small development teams, each owning the responsibility for the quality of what they produce, with a QA in each dev-team. QA at Spotify stands for "Quality Assistance" and not "Quality Assurance", we are there to help the dev team (as a part of it) to deliver.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Up until yesterday, I had only gone to testing conferences - for me these were a safe familiar place. I was with my "own kind". So when my boyfriend asked me a few months ago if I wanted to go to Leetspeak, I surprised myself a bit by saying yes. After all, the price was very reasonable (less than 200SEK/20EUR) and it was on the weekend so I didn't have to ask for time off work.

To be honest, I wasn't sure what I'd get out of it. Walking into the conference venue - I didn't really have any expectations of what it'd be like.

It was a single track conference with 6 speakers and the MC who gave the opening and closing keynotes.

Strangely enough, I found myself being a bit more shy than I usually am. During the Q&A session for Evelina's talk, I wanted to ask her a question (can't remember what it was now), but I was too scared to ask it as it would draw attention to myself. If I remember correctly, no women asked questions. (Edit: my memory served me wrong, there was at least one woman who asked a question)

All in all, I really enjoyed this conference and am keen to attend Leetspeak 2017.

Here are some of my key takeaways:

Leetspeak is a conference that is purposefully made affordable and on the weekend (in your own time). Martin Mazur explained to us that when they looked into what prevents people from coming to conferences, price and time are two key factors. So they solved this with this one (very well might I add - the conference had 600 people and was sold out).